Google TV, Usability Not Included

Holy cow. Is there any corner of our lives where Google doesn’t want a toehold?

Not anymore. It’s here, just in time for the holidays: Google TV!

Now, let’s be clear: you can’t swing by your local Couch-Potato Depot and ask for “a Google TV.” (Well, you can, but they’ll look at you funny.) Instead, Google TV is an operating system, based on the same Android software that’s inside many app phones. Google hopes that other companies will build it into their TV sets, Blu-ray disc players and set-top boxes. The point of all this is to bring Web videos to your TV set.

Now, the idea of bringing the Web to your TV is not a new idea. It’s been kicking around since the Internet was still in pull-ups.

But no matter how many times the industry tries to cram Web+TV down our throats, the masses just don’t swallow. That’s probably because when we sit down at the TV, we want to be passive, with brains turned off, and when we surf the Web, we’re in a different mind-set: more active, more directed.

For some reason, though, this year, the tech industry is going Web+TV crazy. Maybe it’s because they’re all focusing on Web video, not the whole Internet enchilada (e-mail, browsing and so on). Already, you can get services like YouTube, Netflix on demand and Amazon movies through set-top boxes like Apple TV, Roku, Western Digital Live Hub, TiVo Premiere and many others.

But Google TV wants to reopen the case for the whole Internet on your TV. It offers access to Web video but also has a full-blown (well, mostly blown) Web browser built in.

At this early stage, only three gadgets have Google TV: a 46-inch Sony TV (the catchy-named NSX-46GT1, $1,400) and two devices that put it on your existing TV, a Sony Blu-ray player (NSZ-GT1, $400) and a set-top box from Logitech called the Revue (steeply priced at $300). I tried out the Sony TV and the Logitech box.

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Credit
Stuart Goldenberg

This much is clear: Google TV may be interesting to technophiles, but it’s not for average people. On the great timeline of television history, Google TV takes an enormous step in the wrong direction: toward complexity.

For starters, it requires a mouse and keyboard. That’s right. For your TV. Hope you weren’t going for that rustic look in your TV room.

Sony’s remote control is a two-handed affair, designed like an Xbox game controller, with a BlackBerry-style keyboard and arrow keys that slowly, awkwardly move the cursor around the screen. The Logitech’s remote is, if you can believe it, an actual, full-size, wireless computer keyboard, with a trackpad and mouse clicker in the corner. (For $130, you can replace it with a smaller BlackBerry-style keyboard remote.)

So why do you need a keyboard? First, you need it to navigate Chrome, Google’s Web browser.

Second, you need the keyboard for Google TV’s star feature: Search. When you press Search on the keyboard, you can type in a show or subject —“taylor swift,” say, or “modern family.” You’re instantly rewarded with a master list of TV shows, Web videos (from all different Web sites) and even apps (more on apps in a moment) that match your query. Just scroll, click and play.

You can even search for and then change channels by typing, for example, “MSNBC” or “CNN.” Nice.

Unfortunately, the search function is unpredictable. Sometimes, it searches all TV, Web and apps. Other times, it just opens the address bar of the Web browser, so that you wind up searching the whole Web instead of just videos. In still other situations, it searches only the program you’re using (the Twitter app, for example).

That’s a little confusing. So is the Dual View button, which puts your current TV show into a picture-in-picture inset, so you can surf the Web and watch your show simultaneously.

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Sony’s remote for Google TV is like a game controller. You may need both thumbs to surf channels.Credit
Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg News

Fine. But you can’t move or resize the inset, which is a problem when it’s covering up, say, the Send or O.K. button of some Web site or dialogue box. And when you’re not watching TV, the Dual View button does nothing at all. (Shouldn’t it create a TV inset whether you’re watching TV or not?)

On the main menu, quick: what’s the difference between Bookmarks and the Queue? What’s the difference between Applications and Spotlights? All of them look the same: labeled icons.

It’s all customizable, unfamiliar and mostly baffling, and you don’t get a single page of instructions. (I learned how to use Google TV by shooting a fusillade of questions to the Google P.R. people — an option I’m guessing won’t be open to you.)

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So what are TV apps? Apparently, they’re like Web pages with video. For example, the CNBC app shows the live CNBC broadcast with a list of stocks on the right side.

So far, there are only a handful of apps, all installed by Google, like CNBC, Pandora, Netflix and an N.B.A. app. Google says that the real fun won’t begin until next year, when it will let programmers write TV apps, just the way they do now for Android phones.

There’s a What’s On list of TV shows that are on right now. But otherwise, there’s no TV guide, except for the TV listings channel that your cable company already provides.

The problem with Google’s open approach, of course, is that it breeds inconsistency and chaos. The Logitech Revue, for example, feels so much faster and better designed than the Sony. Once I told it I had a TiVo, for example, its keyboard could miraculously control all the TiVo functions.

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Logitech’s set-top box uses a full-size, wireless computer keyboard.

On the Sony remote, why are the Home, Menu, Back and Dual View buttons on a ring, as if they’re somehow related? Why are there two O.K. buttons — one inside that ring, one inside the arrow-buttons ring — and each works only sometimes?

So much of Google TV and what it offers reflects its infant status. For example, you can buy movies from Amazon’s movie service, but not in high definition.

Another example: In an app called Clicker, the very first offering was a David Letterman Top 10 list — but trying to play it produced only an error message: “The video you have requested is not available on this device.”

That’s because every major TV network, as well as Hulu.com, has blocked Google TV so that you can’t see shows from its Web site. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense — do they want viewers, or don’t they? In any case, that still doesn’t explain why Google TV lists shows it can’t play.

There’s not much integration, either. You can use the Search command to find a certain show, but if you want to record it, you have to exit Google TV and program it into your video recorder manually. (The exception: If you have Dish satellite, then you can click Record right in the list of search results.)

But even if Google TV one day becomes more refined, the central problem remains: on the Web, videos routinely freeze, stutter, take forever to load or show “missing plug-in” error messages. We’re used to that. We have low expectations — on the Web.

But do we really want to pay hundreds of dollars to bring this sort of flakiness to our TV sets?

It will probably take a long time, and a lot more refinement, before Google TV is attractive to anyone besides tech-heads — especially when, for only $60, you can get most of the same stuff (Netflix, Amazon on demand, Pandora, Major League Baseball, apps) on a Roku box.

But don’t worry for Google. There’s plenty of world left for it to conquer. Here’s looking forward to Google Car, Google Bank, Google Microwave. ...

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on November 18, 2010, on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Google TV, Usability Not Included. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe